There Are A Lot More Galaxies Out There Than We Thought

About ten times more, to be more specific. And to be even more specific, somewhere around one or two trillion, compared to the 100-200 billion galaxies we previously thought was the total.

Now, to be fair, we haven't actually seen any of these new galaxies yet. Our telescopes aren't powerful enough to. But because of math, we know they should be out there. Otherwise, the numbers don't work out. I don't have a whole lot to say about this, other than "Cool, 10 times more galaxies." I mean, greater understanding of our universe is important, and obviously, this is something newsworthy, but basically, what this boils down to is "Gee, you know how the universe is just enormous? Well now it's even enormouser!" Yeah, spellcheck, I know that's not a word. Maybe I'll be a little more interested when we can actually see these new (very, very old) galaxies.

The Case of the Missing Stars

It seems that globular clusters in the Fornax galaxy cluster are missing some stars. The population of these globular clusters is split equally between old stars and new stars. This does not fit in with current theories on the formation of those objects. Until now, scientists assumed that the stars in globular clusters all formed at the same time, and that most, if not all the stars would be old. Any new stars would form from ejected star material, but theories predicted that old stars should outnumber new stars considerably. Observationally, that isn't the case for Fornax.

It's actually not the case for the Milky Way's globular clusters, either. They have a similar star make-up, but scientists assumed that something caused the clusters to lose older stars. They can't make the same assumption for Fornax, because there's nowhere the stars could have gone where we couldn't detect them. They're just not there. So, it may take some serious rethinking to figure out how these globular clusters actually formed.

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